136 LANGUAGE AND MENTAL DEVELOPMENT OF CHILDREN
words—what or are or you or do—and he may deliver himself of
his emphasis accordingly. These are the things which help to
make fpecch more direct and forcible than written language can
easily be. Realizing this, a writer may plan to put his speech
down on paper just as it would come from him, and then proceed
to underline the words and phrases which stand out in his mind;
by doing so he will convey something of his feeling as well as of
his thought. But the special pains that have been taken to make
writing convey both thought and feeling with the utmost accuracy
and effectiveness, whatever the subject treated, will always
include more than the trick of underlining, the equivalent
in handwriting of the printer's italicizing practice.
It has often been remarked that underlining is an essentially
feminine habit.1 But if so it must be not because woman's language
is inferior to man's, but because it is less influenced by literary
models and in its own way more fluent and flexible, more expres-
sive of concrete meanings, and less concerned with abstract
theorizing. An intelligent woman knows intuitively that the
circumstances in which letter-writing is carried on are such as
to bring down the charge of pedantry on the heads of those who
construct their sentences on the model of the formal essay or
the newspaper leading article, employing appropriate degrees of
subordination among the clauses of their deliberately framed,
sentences and taking advantage of the strategic positions in
these sentences to place there their more important words. Great
scholars are not as a rule the best letter-writers, whereas intelligent
women frequently are. As Dorothy Osborne, one of the best of
them, said:
All letters should be free and easy as one's discourse. 'Tis an
admirable thing to see how some people will labour to find out
terms that may obscure a plain sense. Like a gentleman I know
who could never say "the weather grew cold5' but that "winter
began to salute us." I have no patience with such coxcombs.
16. TAKING THE OTHER POINT OF VIEW
The ability to sec things from the point of view of another
person which is developed through the necessity of having to
foresee how one's letters will be read by their recipients^ largely
a matter of intellectual and social maturity. As long as* the child
does not realize that his own point of view is a private one, and
one only among a number of possible points of view, he will
1 The letters of Qjueen Victoria show the tendency to a marked extent. Jespersen's
*$xapter on the language of women, in his book, Language, Its Nature, Development^ and
Mgin, should alsolxe read in this connexion.